Today, the Sabine River runs as before, yet the bottoms have been drained. Long gone are the alligators, and the few birds that take to the air cast tiny shadows over concrete surfaces.

But way back then, during the thick of the Great Depression that squeezed Deep East Texas in its impoverishing grip, a boy could hear the crickets and the frogs in the star-studded southern night. And in this primordial time a killer stalked the land.

When young Harry Crane discovers the black woman's body, mutilated and bound to a tree with barbed wire, he unwittingly unleashes a storm of uncontrolled fear, thinly buried racial animosities, and fearsomely escalating violence. Jacob Crane, Harry's father and the town constable, struggles valiantly to see that proper justice gets done.

Then Harry and his younger sister, Thomasina, fix their own growing suspicions on the legendary native horror called the Goat Man who, the locals say, lurks beneath the swinging bridge that crosses the Sabine. More real than they ever could have imagined, the creature holds the key to a string of brutal and confounding murders.

The Bottoms is part mystery, part coming-of-age story, and one-hundred-percent pure storytelling brilliance from one of the most supremely inventive American novelists alive today.